eastofeden

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

thank you for telling me about the water.”
“Have I depressed you with my rambling?”
“No, not at all—not at all. It’s Cathy’s first baby and she’s miserable.”
Adam struggled all night with his thoughts and the next day he drove out and shook

hands with Bordoni and the Sanchez place was his.

111

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

Chapter 14

1

There is so much to tell about the Western country in that day that it is hard to know
where to start. One thing sets off a hundred others. The problem is to decide which one to
tell first.

You remember that Samuel Hamilton said his children had gone to a dance at the
Peach Tree School. The country schools were the centers of culture then. The Protestant
churches in the towns were fighting for their existence in a country where they were new-
comers. The Catholic church, first on the scene and deeply dug in, sat in comfortable
tradition while the missions were gradually abandoned and their roofs fell in and pigeons
roosted on the stripped altars. The library (in Latin and Spanish) of the San Antonio
Mission was thrown into a granary, where the rats ate off the sheepskin bindings. In the
country the repository of art and science was the school, and the schoolteacher shielded
and carried the torch of learning and of beauty. The schoolhouse was the meeting place
for music, for debate. The polls were set in the schoolhouse for elections. Social life,
whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-
night dance, could be held nowhere else. And the teacher was not only an intellectual
paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family
could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher. Her children were pre-
sumed to have intellectual advantages both inherited and conditioned.

The daughters of Samuel Hamilton were not destined to become work-destroyed farm
wives. They were handsome girls and they carried with them the glow of their descent
from the kings of Ireland. They had a pride that transcended their poverty. No one ever
thought of them as deserving pity. Samuel raised a distinctly superior breed. They were
better read and better bred than most of their contemporaries. To all of them Samuel
communicated his love of learning, and he set them apart from the prideful ignorance of
their time. Olive Hamilton became a teacher. That meant that she left home at fifteen and
went to live in Salinas, where she could go to secondary school. At seventeen she took
county board examinations, which covered all the arts and sciences, and at eighteen she
was teaching school at Peach Tree.

In her school there were pupils older and bigger than she was. It required great tact to
be a schoolteacher. To keep order among the big undisciplined boys without pistol and
bull whip was a difficult and dangerous business. In one school in the mountains a
teacher was raped by her pupils.

Olive Hamilton had not only to teach everything, but to all ages. Very few youths went
past the eighth grade in those days, and what with farm duties some of them took
fourteen or fifteen years to do it. Olive also had to practice rudimentary medicine, for
there were constant accidents. She sewed up knife cuts after a fight in the schoolyard.
When a small barefooted boy was bitten by a rattlesnake, it was her duty to suck his toe
to draw the poison out.

112

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

She taught reading to the first grade and algebra to the eighth. She led the singing,
acted as a critic of literature, wrote the social notes that went weekly to the Salinas
Journal. In addition, the whole social life of the area was in her hands, not only
graduation exercises, but dances, meetings, debates, chorals, Christmas and May Day
festivals, patriotic exudations on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. She was on the
election board and headed and held together all charities. It was far from an easy job, and
it had duties and obligations beyond belief. The teacher had no private life. She was
watched jealously for any weakness of character. She could not board with one family for
more than one term, for that would cause jealousy—a family gained social ascendancy by
boarding the teacher. If a marriageable son belonged to the family where she boarded a
proposal was automatic; if there was more than one claimant, vicious fights occurred over
her hand. The Aguita boys, three of them, nearly clawed each other to death over Olive
Hamilton. Teachers rarely lasted very long in the country schools. The work was so hard
and the proposals so constant that they married within a very short time.

This was a course Olive Hamilton determined she would not take. She did not share the
intellectual enthusiasms of her father, but the time she had spent in Salinas determined
her not to be a ranch wife. She wanted to live in a town, perhaps not so big as Salinas but
at least not a crossroads. In Salinas, Olive had experienced niceties of living, the choir
and vestments, Altar Guild, and bean suppers of the Episcopal church. She had partaken
of the arts—road companies of plays and even operas, with their magic and promise of an
aromatic world outside. She had gone to parties, played charades, competed in poetry
readings, joined a chorus and orchestra. Salinas had tempted her. There she could go to a
party dressed for the party and come home in the same dress, instead of rolling her
clothes in a saddlebag and riding ten miles, then unrolling and pressing them.

Busy though she was with her teaching, Olive longed for the metropolitan life, and
when the young man who had built the flour mill in King City sued properly for her hand,
she accepted him subject to a long and secret engagement. The secrecy was required
because if it were known there would be trouble among the young men in the
neighborhood.

Olive had not her father’s brilliance, but she did have a sense of fun, together with her
mother’s strong and undeviating will. What light and beauty could be forced down the
throats of her reluctant pupils, she forced.

There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and
that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty
of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city—to
consider himself better than his father. Enough arithmetic to measure land and lumber
and to keep accounts, enough writing to order goods and write to relatives, enough
reading for newspapers, almanacs, and farm journals, enough music for religious and
patriotic display—that was enough to help a boy and not to lead him astray. Learning was
for doctors, lawyers, and teachers, a class set off and not considered related to other
people. There were some sports, of course, like Samuel Hamilton, and he was tolerated
and liked, but if he had not been able to dig a well, shoe a horse, or run a threshing
machine, God knows what would have been thought of the family.

Olive did marry her young man and did move, first to Paso Robles, then to King City,
and finally to Salinas. She was as intuitive as a cat. Her acts were based on feelings rather
than thoughts. She had her mother’s firm chin and button nose and her father’s fine eyes.

113

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

She was the most definite of any of the Hamiltons except her mother. Her theology was a
curious mixture of Irish fairies and an Old Testament Jehovah whom in her later life she
confused with her father. Heaven was to her a nice home ranch inhabited by her dead
relatives. External realities of a frustrating nature she obliterated by refusing to-believe in
them, and when one resisted her disbelief she raged at it. It was told of her that she cried
bitterly because she could not go to two dances on one Saturday night. One was in
Greenfield and the other in San Lucas—twenty miles apart. To have gone to both and
then home would have entailed a sixty-mile horseback ride. This was a fact she could not
blast with her disbelief, and so she cried with vexation and went to neither dance.

As she grew older she developed a scattergun method for dealing with unpleasant facts.
When I, her only son, was sixteen I contracted pleural pneumonia, in that day a killing
disease. I went down and down, until the wing tips of the angels brushed my eyes. Olive
used her scattergun method of treating pleural pneumonia, and it worked. The
Episcopalian minister prayed with and for me, the Mother Superior and nuns of the
convent next to our house held me up to Heaven for relief twice a day, a distant relative
who was a Christian Science reader held the thought for me. Every incantation, magic,
and herbal formula known was brought out, and she got two good nurses and the town’s
best doctors. Her method was practical. I got well. She was loving and firm with her
family, three girls and me, trained us in housework, dish washing, clothes washing, and
manners. When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child
as easily as if he were a boiled almond.

When I recovered from my pneumonia it came time for me to learn to walk again. I had
been nine weeks in bed, and the muscles had gone lax and the laziness of recovery had
set in. When I was helped up, every nerve cried, and the wound in my side, which had
been opened to drain the pus from the pleural cavity, pained horribly. I fell back in bed,
crying, “I can’t do it! I can’t get up!”

Olive fixed me with her terrible eye. “Get up!” she said. “Your father has worked all
day and sat up all night. He has gone into debt for you. Now get up!”

And I got up.
Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of
the month was a debt. The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor.
Olive, who truly believed that her family was the best in the world, quite snobbishly
would not permit it to be touched by debt. She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her
children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of
living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-
payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not
own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that
the neighbors had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.

2

Olive had great courage. Perhaps it takes courage to raise children. And I must tell you
what she did about the First World War. Her thinking was not international. Her first
boundary was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there
was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line. Thus she did not quite
believe in the war, not even when Troop C, our militia cavalry, was called out, loaded its
horses on a train, and set out for the open world.

Martin Hopps lived around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired. His

114

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say
good morning to him was to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to
Troop C because the armory had a basketball court.

If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of
their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed
Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after
them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him
Olive declared war on the German empire.

She cast about for a weapon. Knitting helmets and socks was not deadly enough for
her. For a time she put on a Red Cross uniform and met other ladies similarly dressed in
the armory, where bandages were rolled and reputations unrolled. This was all right, but
it was not driving at the heart of the Kaiser. Olive wanted blood for the life of Martin
Hopps. She found her weapon in Liberty bonds. She had never sold anything in her life
beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the basement of the Episcopal
church, but she began to sell bonds by the bale. She brought ferocity to her work. I think
she made people afraid not to buy them. And when they did buy from Olive she gave
them a sense of actual combat, of putting a bayonet in the stomach of Germany.

As her sales skyrocketed and stayed up, the Treasury Department began to notice this
new Amazon. First there came mimeographed letters of commendation, then real letters
signed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and not with a rubber stamp either. We were
proud but not so proud as when prizes began to arrive, a German helmet (too small for
any of us to wear), a bayonet, a jagged piece of shrapnel set on an ebony base. Since we
were not eligible for armed conflict beyond marching with wooden guns, our mother’s
war seemed to justify us. And then she outdid herself, and outdid everyone in our part of
the country. She quadrupled her already fabulous record and she was awarded the fairest
prize of all—a ride in an army airplane.

Oh, we were proud kids! Even vicariously this was an eminence we could hardly stand.
But my poor mother—I must tell you that there are certain things in the existence of
which my mother did not believe, against any possible evidence to the contrary. One was
a bad Hamilton and another was the airplane. The fact that she had seen them didn’t
make her believe in them one bit more.

In the light of what she did I have tried to imagine how she felt. Her soul must have
crawled with horror, for how can you fly in something that does not exist? As a
punishment the ride would have been cruel and unusual, but it was a prize, a gift, an
honor, and an eminence. She must have looked into our eyes and seen the shining
idolatry there and understood that she was trapped. Not to have gone would have let her
family down. She was surrounded, and there was no honorable way out save death. Once
she had decided to go up in the nonexistent thing she seemed to have had no idea
whatever that she would survive it.

Olive made her will—took lots of time with it and had it checked to be sure it was
legal. Then she opened her rosewood box wherein were the letters her husband had
written to her in courtship and since. We had not known he wrote poetry to her, but he
had. She built a fire in the grate and burned every letter. They were hers, and she wanted
no other human to see them. She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being
found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes. I think perhaps she saw the
wide twisted mouth and embarrassed eyes of Martin Hopps on her and felt that in some

115

JOHN STEINBECK – EAST OF EDEN

way she was reimbursing him for his stolen life. She was very gentle with us and did not
notice a badly washed dinner plate that left a greasy stain on the dish towel.

This glory was scheduled to take place at the Salinas Race Track and Rodeo Grounds.
We were driven to the track in an army automobile, feeling more solemn and golden than
at a good funeral. Our father was working at the Spreckles Sugar Factory, five miles from
town and could not get off, or perhaps didn’t want to, for fear he could not stand the
strain. But Olive had made arrangements, on pain of not going up, for the plane to try to
fly as far as the sugar factory before it crashed.

I realize now that the several hundred people who had gathered simply came to see the
airplane, but at that time we thought they were there to do my mother honor. Olive was
not a tall woman and at that age she had begun to put on weight. We had to help her out
of the car. She was probably stiff with fright but her little chin was set.

The plane stood in the field around which the race track was laid out. It was appallingly
little and flimsy—an open cockpit biplane with wooden struts, tied with piano wire. The
wings were covered with canvas. Olive was stunned. She went to the side as an ox to the
knife. Over the clothes she was convinced were her burial clothes, two sergeants slipped
on a coat, a padded coat, and a flight coat, and she grew rounder and rounder with each
layer. Then a leather helmet and goggles, and with her little button of a nose and her pink
cheeks you really had something. She looked like a goggled ball. The two sergeants
hoisted her bodily into the cockpit and wedged her in. She filled the opening completely.
As they strapped her in she suddenly came to life and began waving frantically for
attention. One of the soldiers climbed up, listened to her, came over to my sister Mary,
and led her to the side of the plane. Olive was tugging at the thick padded flight glove on
her left hand. She got her hands free, took off her engagement ring with its tiny diamond,
and handed it down to Mary. She set her gold wedding ring firmly, pulled the gloves back
on, and faced the front. The pilot climbed into the front cockpit, and one of the sergeants
threw his weight on the wooden propeller. The little ship taxied away and turned, and
down the field it roared and staggered into the air, and Olive was looking straight ahead
and probably her eyes were closed.

We followed it with our eyes as it swept up and away, leaving a lonesome silence
behind it. The bond committee, the friends and relatives, the simple unhonored spectators
didn’t think of leaving the field. The plane became a speck in the sky toward Spreckles
and disappeared. It was fifteen minutes before we saw it again, flying serenely and very
high. Then to our horror it seemed to stagger and fall. It fell endlessly, caught itself,
climbed, and made a loop. One of the sergeants laughed. For a moment the plane steadied
and then it seemed to go crazy. It barrel-rolled, made Immelmann turns, inside and
outside loops, and turned over and flew over the field upside down. We could see the
black bullet which was our mother’s helmet. One of the soldiers said quietly, “I think
he’s gone nuts. She’s not a young woman.”

The airplane landed steadily enough and ran up to the group. The motor died. The pilot
climbed out, shaking his head in perplexity. “Goddamest woman I ever saw,” he said. He
reached up and shook Olive’s nerveless hand and walked hurriedly away.

It took four men and quite a long time to get Olive out of the cockpit. She was so rigid
they could not bend her. We took her home and put her to bed, and she didn’t get up for
two days.

What had happened came out slowly. The pilot talked some and Olive talked some,

116